Pocho

Richard is the story’s protagonist, and the narrative traces his development from childhood to young adulthood. A curious, independent, and sometimes fierce young man, he both looks up to his manly and traditional father and rebels against him. Richard feels an intense need to learn, speak, and think for himself, and isn’t afraid to question authorities. He often either impresses or offends people in power with his plain speaking, his sharp mind, and his commitment to the truth.

Richard struggles with a feeling that his real life is elsewhere: He looks with horror on the laborious and humdrum lives of the people around him in his hometown of Santa Clara, California, and longs to escape. His greatest ambition is to be a writer, and his quest for writerly experience leads him to befriend a wide range of people—even when those friends don’t understand what he sees in his other friends.

Introduced like a gunslinger in a Western, Juan Rubio at first seems like an almost mythic figure. A colonel for the famous Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution, he is the picture of traditional Mexican masculinity: tough, virile, philandering, patriarchal, proud—and unafraid to cry.